EVENTS

Sadly, it’s International Women’s Day

It’s that day when we’re supposed to celebrate the accomplishment’s of women. I say “sadly,” because unfortunately there are way too many people out there who would rather sneer at and diminish women’s status in the world.

Let’s remember Lise Meitner, Hilde Mangold, Chien-Shiung Wu, Rosalind Franklin, and Jocelyn Bell — who were all well-qualified (men won the prizes for work equivalent to what they did, instead) to win a Nobel but didn’t get one.

Rather than 0 women, perhaps we should remember Marie Curie and Maria Goeppert Mayer, who won Nobels in physics; Irène Joliot-Curie, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, and Ada E. Yonath in chemistry; Barbara McClintock, Carol W. Greider, Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, Elizabeth H. Blackburn, Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, Gertrude B. Elion, Gerty Cori, Linda B. Buck, Rita Levi-Montalcini, and Rosalyn Yalow, in physiology or medicine. Clearly women are not intrinsically incapable of scientific work at the highest levels. Of those whose work I’m familiar with in detail, I have to tell you that McClintock blows me away with the stunning brilliance of her abstract reasoning — I know of no other male scientist whose work is at all comparable (that of course is a matter of taste!)

The relatively lower frequency of women recieving Nobels is not something any man should take pride in; what it really indicates is that we’ve been shortchanging half the human population, depriving them of opportunities to excel. Wait — we’ve been doing worse than shortchanging women; we’ve been depriving all of humanity of the potential in those minds. This pattern of discrimination against women has hurt us all.

Let’s not forget also all the people, men and women alike, deprived of opportunities because of their race or class — deprived by the kind of endemic bigotry that would, for instance, denigrate an entire group of people as “pop-culture hos”. And it’s not just science — it was good of our petty MRA to remind us that we’ve also lost their contributions to art and theater and games.

That’s what I think of everytime some bigot crows about the absence of some group of people from some field of endeavor — it’s a reminder of all that we’ve lost to selfish stupidity.

Comments

Perhaps someone can tell me about Astrokid NJ’s Nobel prize, his grandmaster status in chess, his international reputation in highbrow art, and his wonderful standup routines? Because I’m sure he has accomplished all of those things, since he is a man.

But you see when men don’t accomplish those things it’s because they didn’t want to or because some money grubbing harpy sucked away their life force, and when women don’t accomplish those things it’s obviously because we’re inferior life forms.

I’m confused. I thought the slimepitters and MRAs weren’t anti-women at all — I was repeatedly assured that they totally believed in women’s equality, in fact, as “equity feminists” they were even more pro-equality than the rest of us. And now PZ is #ftbullying this #bravehero with his mean nasty facts!

At Micheal Nugent’s blog, where the Slymies have been squatting for the past few days, I have read repeatedly that the Slymepit is the true feminist site. Therefore, Astrokid cannot be a true pitter. Could be a plant by oolon.

Marie Curie won two Nobel prizes, the 1903 Physics prize which she shared with Antoine Becquerel and her husband Pierre and the 1911 Chemistry prize which wasn’t shared. She is one of the four people to win two prizes and the only one to win prizes in two different sciences.

A short list of women in mathematics: Agnesi, Germain, Herschel, Hopper, Kovalevskaya, Lovelace, Noether, Robinson, Taussky-Todd, and Young. Their accomplishments stand comparison with at least 95% of men in mathematics. Probably 99%.

I work in combinatorics. Off the top of my head, and just in my specialty subfield, women whose names on a preprint make me promptly download the thing to read are: Jennifer Morse, Carla Savage, Mireille Bousquet-Mélou, Kathrin Bringmann, and Sami Assaf, and I’m sure I’d remember more when I saw them.

On top of the problems with the Nobel prize example, in order for the screed to make a lick of sense, you’ve got to also:
-Turn Chess into Serious Intellectual Business instead of, you know, a game.
-Make sure that artists don’t count unless it is “high brow” art (whatever the fuck that delineation might be).
-Inexplicably include stand-up comedy specifically as an example of intellectual achievement.
-Pretend that “stand-up comedy” is not a subset of “pop culture”.

I mean, really: This is your brain on sexism, folks. Logic need not apply.

Meitner probably would have shared a Nobel if she had been able to stay in Germany and continue working with her team. In any case, she has an element named after her now. No one remembers very many of the Nobel winners, but the periodic table will bear her name forever.

Dick Strawkins: Astrokid is one of the AVFM contingent. I think he was the one that wrote that stupid article over there after the Indian gang rape and murder case, saying that the big problem there was sexism against men!
He seems to barely conceal a hate for women – which is probably the reason he rarely posts here.

Desperate measures by Peezus if he’s forced to trawl through AVFM writers and try to paint them as representitive of the Slymepit.
What next? Johntheother? Paul Elam?

Don’t get too excited, those few comments are still stuffed in between the typical BS from them, frothing at the mouth over everything Ophelia posts, shopping PZ’s face on to a dildo, fat shaming etc…

Don’t buy in to the trope that they are a monolithic group when it comes to opinions about sexism, it’s fuel on the fire for them. Their membership ranges from the extremely misogynistic scum PZ notes here to some rather sensible folks who would otherwise agree with the general missions and goals of feminists, but hang out at and defend the pit anyway because of their fucked up views on free speech.

The only monolithic view they promote is that FTB and the A+ forums are evil because ZOMG! they ban people and occasionally replace truly putrid comments with fluffy bunnies!

* using that term very charitably, and they are very few in comparison to the MRA types or various flavors of sexism deniers or libertarians hung up on personal responsibility and victimhood.

Oh, and to be clear, I’m not at all saying that the two noted here for taking issue with astrokid’s tweet would fall under the “sensible” category I spoke of. And I’m also not defending the pit, at all. If you hang out there and defend it, you’re misguided at best.

I’m only trying to point out that they revel in being able to call anyone who tries to paint them with a broad brush a liar or hypocrite, or accuse them of not knowing anything about the pit, and therefor unqualified to criticize it.

Thanks for the nice post. It’s sad that women’s achievements, whether in science, politics, entertainment, or pretty much any human endeavors, are glossed over at best and more often ignored and forgotten, while many men’s achievements are relatively speaking puffed up and overglorified. For example, how many of the men on the list had support from a wife, mother, or female colleague who was never acknowledged for her efforts? Besides which for thousands of years women have been punished for daring to participate in areas (like science) considered exclusive to men – in many places they still are!

Also, as far as pop culture goes, let’s remember that there seems to be a lot of trash on the men’s side with male celebs abusing their wives while still cashing in on their music and acting. So I think that leveling such an accusation on women is more than unfair. Anyway why is a woman bad just for being popular? Kelly Clarkson, Pink, Rihanna, and even Lindsay Lohan all have my respect, as do most types of popular women, for having the guts to be in the limelight 24/7, being thrust into “rolemodel” status without their consent, and for building their careers to their current level. Most men AND women only dream of doing what people in Hollywood and the music business do every day, and we go about our humdrum lives accusing them of being trashy. Sad.

Thank you again for shining light onto this important issue and calling out sexism where you see it :)

They can revel all they want, I don’t think most of us give a shit. We’re well aware that they’re not all the same, but I can’t say I’m terribly interested in drawing fine distinctions between the ones who harass, the ones who don’t harass themselves but high-five the harassers, and the ones who just nitpick everything at the FtB monolith while ignoring the scumbags amongst them except to act shocked — shocked! — that any of us would hold that against them.

There is one woman from computer science who should be recalled.
Allow me to link you to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper
Rear Admiral (Lower Half) Grace Hopper.
I had the honor of meeting her when she spoke to my student group back in the 80s.
(yes, she gave me a nanosecond! )
[meta: I have probably mentioned her before, probably on a previous IWD]

Those few ‘pitters who are condemning it are only doing so because they know others are watching. That they still choose to associate themselves with a place that’s attractive to people like that is a better indication of their characters.

Let us, guys, spend no more time on this thread worrying about the finer points (sic) of those who reside at the arsehole end of the universe. Let us concentrate on the women. And not just because that’s what PZ intended but because they are far, far more interesting.

Does literature now not count as “highbrow”? Take, for instance, the most recent American Nobel laureate in literature — Toni Morrison — who is a woman and who really fucking deserved her Nobel. Or consider the four women who are Nobel laureates in literature since Morrison’s award.

As for “great standup”? Margaret Cho. And she’s the beginning of the list, not the end.

The Ukraine surprised me because Women’s day is a big, big deal over to here. Every woman seemed to have flowers, shops were giving gifts and we were on the sleeper train with a man and his daughter down to Odessa to see his mom.

Funny how the reactions of the pit turns from mild disapproval (compare it to the level they get themselves up when somebody here appears to be saying something wrong. For all they claim Greg Laden called all men brain-damaged rapists and is still on FtB) to the much bigger crime of PZ calling them out.
Sorry folks, but if those people hang out at your site and are welcome there, they are your problem. And if a not neglectable part of your group overlaps with AvfM, that’s your problem, too.

Sally
Could also be Quevenzhané Wallis. Remember, her big crime is having achieved what nobody achieved before while being a black girl. Which means that what she excelled at has now officially become trivial and just generally not noteworthy and vain.

We’re not just dealing with skeptics who happen to be misogynists. Forums are being flooded with sewage from places like AVFM, who just hate women, and aren’t the slightest bit interested in skepticism. Astrokid NJ seems to be a case in point.

I have this horrible vision of Astrokid NJ (or some other misogynist asshat) standing up at a Nobel Prize presentation in which the prize is going to a woman and shouting, “Tits or GTFO!”

[/META]

In school, Curie was the only female scientist that I can remember being mentioned. Ever. And at least twice, she was held up as an example to show that yes, you girls can become scientists and do great things. But if one female scientist is mentioned while discussing 50 males scientists, what message did/does that send?

This is a topic which has been researched in considerable detail by historians of science in relatively recent years. The articles reproduced at ur-B&W go into considerable detail and include extensive references and bibliography.

Regardless of what they may or may not have talked about over the dinner table, which obviously is unknown, there is significant evidence in the form of letters, accounts from friends, their respective grades at the Polytechnic, and so on, none of which indicates any degree of substantive collaboration.

On top of the problems with the Nobel prize example, in order for the screed to make a lick of sense, you’ve got to also:
-Turn Chess into Serious Intellectual Business instead of, you know, a game.

I don’t think we need to denigrate chess in order to refute this article. Like every long-established complex strategy game, there is a lot of intellectual spadework you have to do in order to become even moderately proficient in the field. It requires memorization of openings, a knowledge of endgame theory (including extremely complex positions like bishop and knight checkmates), and a fundamental understanding of the various schools of chess thought, from the Romantic style to Philodor’s Positional style to the Hypermodernism of Nimzowitsch, Réti, etc. and finally the New Dynamism, the modern blending of all these trends.

It’s just this background that barred chess to many women, who were expected to fulfill all the household duties for their family (if unmarried) or husbands (if married). Like any learned skill, chess takes hours of practice each day for professional-level playing, and that kind of dedication is inconsistent with being expected to run the house on one’s own. Even today, these social roles haven’t been entirely overcome, but there are many more women in chess today. The FIDE recognizes the category of WGM—women’s grandmaster—and there are many women who have become just plain GMs in their own right, like Judit Polgar, Hou Yifan, Koneru Humpy, etc. As social roles tend to equalize, we’re bound to see many more women earning their GM norms along with their male counterparts.

I can’t guess. Whatever the delineation means, it cannot include novels, poetry, plays, painting, sculpture, or classical music. Maybe “high brow art” means posting on Twitter, in which case this ridiculous screed is an example of performance art and should not be taken seriously.

Far more men play chess than women and based on that simple fact, you could actually predict the differences we see in chess ability at the highest level. It’s a simple statistical fact that the best performers from a large group are probably going to be better than the best performers from a small one. Even if two groups have the same average skill and, importantly, the same range in skill, the most capable individuals will probably come from the larger group… The model revealed that the greater proportion of male chess players accounts for a whopping 96% of the difference in ability between the two genders at the highest level of play. If more women took up chess, you’d see that difference close substantially… So why are there so few female chess grandmasters? Because fewer women play chess. It’s that simple. This overlooked fact accounts for so much of the observable differences that other possible explanations, be they biological, cultural or environmental, are just fighting for scraps at the table.

This is Soviet legacy, and you’ll see the ‘8 of March’ celebrated even in those ex-Soviet places where the holiday isn’t official. Unfortunately, it has long been perverted (like many progressive ideas in the SU), and isn’t much more of a clone of St.Valentine’s Day, with lots of sexist crap (‘oh-oh, let’s be chivalrous to appease the otherwise nagging fairer sex at least today’) flogged on every corner.

Hou Yifan, Awarded Grandmaster at 14.5 years old, currently the 15th fastest GM of all time
Judit Polgar, Grandmaster at 15, faster then Bobby Fischer
Alexandra Kosteniuk, WGM at 14, GM by 20; she also found time to complete the Russian equivalent of high school by age 15.

Clara Schumann was the main breadwinner for her family through giving concerts and teaching, and she did most of the work of organizing her own concert tours. She refused to accept charity when a group of musicians offered to put on a benefit concert for her. In addition to raising her own large family, when one of her children became incapacitated, she took on responsibility for raising her grandchildren. During the May Uprising in Dresden in 1849, she famously walked into the city through the front lines, defying a pack of armed men who confronted her, rescued her children, then walked back out of the city through the dangerous areas again.

Her family life was punctuated by tragedy. Four of her eight children and her husband died before she did, and her husband and one of her sons ended their lives in insane asylums. Her first son Emil died in 1847, aged only one. Her husband Robert had a mental collapse, attempted suicide in 1854, and was committed to an insane asylum for the last two years of his life. In 1872 her daughter Julie died, leaving two small children. In 1879, her son Felix, aged 25, died. Her son Ludwig suffered from mental illness, like his father, and, in her words, had to be “buried alive” in an institution. Her son Ferdinand died at the age of 43 and she was required to raise his children. She herself became deaf in later life and she often needed a wheelchair.

Composing gives me great pleasure… there is nothing that surpasses the joy of creation, if only because through it one wins hours of self-forgetfulness, when one lives in a world of sound.
—Clara Schumann
Clara has composed a series of small pieces, which show a musical and tender ingenuity such as she has never attained before. But to have children, and a husband who is always living in the realm of imagination, does not go together with composing. She cannot work at it regularly, and I am often disturbed to think how many profound ideas are lost because she cannot work them out.
—Robert Schumann in the joint diary of Robert and Clara Schumann.

As far as women composers are concerned, The International Encyclopedia of Women Composers by Aaron I. Cohen lists over 6000 names over two volumes.

I’d like to give a shout-out to Elinor Ostrom, the most recent political scientist to win a Nobel Prize. (We don’t have one in our field, so when our ilk win it’s typically in economics, as is Professor Ostrom’s.)

#51 vaiyt
The corollary being that women were made by God and Nature to be wives and mothers; interested only in babies and cleaning toilets; have no interest in the public sphere and public acclaim and have no head for “deep thinking”. All of which requires societies to create the most draconian laws and punishments to ensure this Natural Law isn’t broken.
You know, the same way we have to pass laws to ensure that objects fall downward and dogs to walk on four legs.